census story, mazie’s fall

Here’s my story in Monday’s paper, on how Texans are more edumacated now than ever before. Not sure where it is in the print edition, since I’m still in Louisiana.
This has been a stressful weekend. The low point came at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning. That’s when I scrubbed at the small puddles of my grandmother‘s blood on the bathroom floor, a frenzied attempt to clean them before they’d stain.
My grandmother and I have oddly complementary sleep schedules when I’m visiting here. I usually stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., watching the wonders of late-night TV. She goes to sleep around 7 p.m. or so, then wakes up at 2 or 3. We often overlap by a few minutes.
Last night, I’d gone to bed a bit earlier than normal, around 1:30 or so. My grandmother got up about an hour later to do some laundry. But after starting the washer, she lost her balance, fell hard against the dryer, and screamed.
I dashed in (my bedroom’s two feet from the washer and dryer) and saw her bleeding heavily. Three big chunks of skin, each between one and two square inches, had been sliced off her left arm and were dangling by a thread of flesh. Just the outermost layer, nothing deep, but there was blood everywhere — on the dryer, on the floor, on her nightgown.
You see, my grandmother really frightened me this weekend. She was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis about two years ago. In essence, her lungs are slowly turning to scar tissue, which will kill her. For a while we didn’t think she had much time left; the phrase “a couple of months” was bandied about. But with the help of pill after pill after pill — she’s on more than 20 medications — she’s hung in there. She’s changed quite a bit: she’s slower, the pills have added about 100 pounds. But she’s hung in there.
I drove into Rayne around 2 a.m. Friday night, and when I walked in, she was shaking. I’d never seen her shaking, except for that time she visited my in Toledo in the winter. She looked weaker than I’d ever seen her; she had difficulty making sense, and understanding what I was saying. After she’d been sent to the hospital a couple of days ago for a lung infection, she’d been put on two new medications. They seemed to be screwing with her head.
It scared me. I come down to Rayne about every five or six weekends, and I’m always conscious of the fact each time might be my last seeing her. But Friday night, it really seemed possible.
Saturday was much better. She seemed like her old self, yammering away about Rayne politics and cracking jokes. But then she fell against the dryer. Her sense of balance — never strong, since we Bentons are by nature a clumsy people — is being driven more off than normal by the new medicine. Her skin has become freakishly dry, thanks to the meds, and fragile. Her arms have been more black and blue than flesh-colored for the last year because she bruises so easily. (The nurse who comes to visit her every so often always asks if she’s being beaten. She’s not, unless beatings by medication count.) When she fell last night, her arms didn’t even hit anything sharp, just the rounded edge of the dryer, but that was enough to shave off skin.
I pulled her into the bathroom, where we washed it off with peroxide and water, put some sort of cream she called for on it, cut away two flaps of skin with scissors (she insisted), and bandaged it up as best we could. After a while of sitting down, the adrenaline stopped pumping quite so violently, and we went back to sleep. Well, in my case, back to bed. Not quite back to sleep.
Today, she was back in good form. Cranky, but the kind of cranky that’s been part of her healthy personality for decades. But I keep worrying. I leave town Monday afternoon and won’t be back for a month. I hope she’s here waiting for me then.